An exciting premise, but this book and I have gotten off on the wrong foot. Carlson's delivery is not particularly immersive, and I'm not a fan of her Latina accent for Jessica's neighbor (it's distracting to have such a strong stereotype in the narrative, even as a drive by).

That is nothing compared to how much I don't like her werewolves, however. The prophecy and general panic about a female werewolf aside, when Jessica has an obviously expository rehash of werewolf mating practices, I was very unpleasantly surprised. As there are no female werewolves, they mate with human females. They have a low birthrate, so they sleep with lots and lots of human females. These women don't know they are sleeping with a werewolf. A werewolf that maintains his disguise through magic "saliva roofie". It is not implied that the roofie helps them get women into bed, but there is mention of instigating some "process" to impregnante them (I'm imagining big werewolf claws poking holes in a condom), which the women don't sound like they're aware of. The final nail in the coffin is the fact that carrying a werewolf baby has a high mortality rate for the women, which they're also not told. These guys are essentially using these women as disposable brood farms and endangering their lives without their knowledge.

Now compare this impression with Jessica's description of her parents relationship (before her mother died in childbirth, that is), and it paints a different picture. Her father loved her mother, and doesn't fit the whole date-rapist, baby-farmer described above. Unfortunately, the lengthy, awful, technical description dwarfs any "fond memories" related about Jessica's parents, meaning those few sentences don't balance out what sounds like a fundamentally mysoginistic and creepy race of men.

I'm curious about Jessica's destiny, as well as learning more about her mate, but I'm not particularly impressed by the story thus far.

Update after completion: The peaks and valleys of this book have cancelled out into a general "I liked it". The preternatural mythology is interesting, but my excitement over this world was tempered by a few credulity stretches (lots of preternatural action without consequence in this “closed world”) and the breeding mechanism of the werewolves made it very, very hard to forgive them as a species. Bizarre roofie saliva aside, it appears they sleep with as many women as they can with the intent to impregnate them. This is forgivable (and not new ground, *cough* World of the Lupi *cough*), but bearing a werewolf baby also has a very high mortality rate. So a woman don’t know she’s sleeping with a wolf, that he’s trying to knock her up , or that she has an increased risk of dying in childbirth. That is pretty goddamn cold.

The narrative was also rough in a few places. Carlson did a fairly good job presenting a lot of information without data dumps, but there are a few notable instances where she failed. I think the reason that I reacted so negatively to the werewolf breeding culture (ick) was that it was all dropped into conversation in a fairly artificial chunk.

This book reminded me a lot of Rachel Vincent’s Shifter series, both in the world and my reaction (as that is one series that I never quite finished). I look forward to reading more of the Full Blooded series, but I’m not confident in how far I’ll get.